Echo & the Bunnymen - Crystal Days 1979 - 1999

One tends to listen to retrospectives with concern to one’s own history. At least I do. I first listened to Echo and the Bunnymen on wet, fall days driving along the shiny, slick pavement to suburban cul-de-sacs. Everything was romantic that year. People around me had tragic crushes, beautiful sweaters and manicured front lawns. The Smiths were about to break up. A girl I knew moped all year over a boy named Scott. She often rode in the car next to me and her cardigan smelt of hairspray and Camel cigarettes. She made these mix tapes with Joy Division, the Cure, Love and Rockets and Echo and the Bunnymen. She used to sing "A Promise." "You said something will change/We were all dressed up/Somewhere to go/No sign of rain/But something will change/You promised" she sang quietly to herself. My friend Willey and I weren’t listening, we were too busy discussing singers in respect to romantic poets. Ian McCulloch was Byron to Robert Smith’s Shelley and Morrisey’s Keats. I listened to "the Game" as I walked my dog around our subdivision; the street lights forming large, dull circles on the pavement. I measured the blocks in large, softening circles of light. Everyone was making mix tapes for each other with all the same bands. My favorite Echo and the Bunnymen gems of those mix tapes are on this collection: the droning cover of "All You Need is Love."

The Bunnymen were there for me years later when I fell in love. I fell in love so hard that I couldn’t sleep. I watched buses run all night out my window until, with their increasing frequency, I knew dawn was arriving. I listened to the "Killing Moon" -"Under blue moon I saw you/So soon you’ll take me/Up in your arms/Too late to beg you or cancel it"- and "Seven Seas" as I wrote her countless letters while she toiled in studio at a far away art school. I listened and thought of her smooth, small hands and her fuzzy sweaters. Later, we were in the same city and listened to "Never Stop" while driving along tree-lined streets to her place where we would sleep on soft white sheets and awake to the morning light forcing geometric patterns on her hand made, checkered curtains.